Ivars Gravlejs – My Newspaper

The project My Newspaper was realized during one year while I was working as a photoreporter in one of the main daily Czech newspapers – “Deník”. Everyday from photo editors and journalists I got several assignments to photograph events around Prague. Before sending photographs to the newspaper's Photo-bank I quickly manipulated them in Photoshop. Originally idea was to change some little, unimportant details where the manipulation wouldn't change much the content of the photograph, for example, adding some more buttons on writer's Zdenek Mahler T-shirt or painting inscription – „Cunt“ on the brick wall. Although during the process it happened to make some more radical ones, for example, creating a traffic jam on the highway or cutting off singer's José Carreras finger. The aim of this project was to make an absurd, “nonsense” manipulation over the media manipulations.
Ivars Gravlejs

Gravlej’s project My Newspaper is a typical example of the so called „Subversive Art“. Art which is parasitic on the concrete subject and affects this subject (in this case media society), undermines and criticizes it. On the one hand Ivars Gravlejs deconstructs authority of medial business, deconstructs authenticity and objectivity
of information (in any way medialised and interpreted), but on the other hand Gravlejs contemplates the circumstances of contemporary artist, who often has to suspend his/her creative process in order to earn money for living. Gravlejs carefully „smuggled“ his art in a everyday „Non-Art“ activity.
Milan Mikuláštík

Exhibition winner of competition SITTCOMM.AWARD: Ivars Gravlejs - My Newspaper (2009)
Wyspiański Pavilion, 2 Wszystkich Świętych square
open: 8–30.05; daily: 9:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.

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